EPN Industrial Automation Blog

LIN in automation

The comparatively simple LIN bus is quite well suited for industrial applications that don’t require too many control lines. With the ever increasing number of automated systems, there are more niches for such »simple« applications – as a consequence, LIN is continuously growing out of the automotive area.

Connect for free

People like me and maybe you who knew the Internet even before this chap in Geneva invented the World Wide Web know what it’s content always was supposed to be: free, at least free of cost. This seems to change (slowly), but offers like a freely downloadable Ethernet platform indicates that this school of thought is not completely fighting a losing battle.

Enabler of Energy Savings

Do you like exaggerations? Well, if you don’t, please skip the next sentence. If so, then you’ll be happy to hear, that STMicroelectronics says they brought the world’s first combination of protection and termination IC to market. They claim it might enable system designers to increase performance, reduce power and simplify design. Any comments on this are highly appreciated.

Focussing energy efficiency

“We want to provide a complete and cost-effective solution”, states Jürgen Hoika. The Director Marketing Microcontroller Industrial and Multimarket at Infineon Technologies is convinced that the two new Low-Cost 8-Bit MCU series will fit well into applications like energy efficient designs of drives, automation, lighting solutions, and Human Machine Interfaces (HMI).